The departmental servers coxeter and sphere and the mail, web, share, and ptr servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, May 22, 2019 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5pm.

Microsoft has issued advisory which describes a serious Remote Desktop (RDP) vulnerability. Attacks can occur with no passwords needed.

According to SANS:

Title: Microsoft patches 79 vulnerabilities, 22 critical
Description: Microsoft released its monthly security update today, disclosing a variety of vulnerabilities in several of its products. The latest Patch Tuesday covers 79 vulnerabilities, 22 of which are rated “critical,” 55 that are considered “important” and one “moderate.”

NOTE: Windows 7 is end of life in 7 months. Please update to Windows 10 now.

At approximately 19:30 on Thursday April 4th there was an extensive power outage across campus which also affected the Bahen building. Power to Bahen returned at approximately 20:15, and efforts to restart the computer systems at the Mathematics Department commenced at 20:30. All systems were back online by 22:15.

Since the scanning done on the Ricoh photocopiers in BA6290A and PG104A is primarily for Crowdmark and the photocopiers had different resolution defaults we decided to make them the same. It was suggested that 400 dpi would be good, so we have done that. If you think that 300 dpi would be a better default please let us know.

There seems to be no way to change the default contrast setting and whether one wishes to have the scanning set to one- or two-sided on these photocopiers.

We will be updating our networking hardware in the near future so that our department can more easily join the new VoIP telecommunications system that UofT has selected. We have to change many network switches and there will be two-hour windows when network connections for some people will stop working. Occassionally there will be short (less than 10 minutes) network outages for whole networks.

Information about the schedule for these outages will be posted on this blog.

The departmental servers coxeter and sphere and the mail, web, share, and ptr servers will have software updates applied on Wednesday afternoon, March 20, 2019 which will require rebooting (most servers will be unavailable starting at 4:15pm). Since some updates will be applied while the servers are still up there may be some temporary issues with some software. We hope that any such issues will be minor and by doing most of the upgrading before bringing systems down the shorter downtime will be worth the potential minor problems. Please restart any programs if you observe problems during the upgrades (and please let us know at requests@math.toronto.edu, so we can investigate). We expect the systems to be back up by 5pm.

In addition to the usual reports of both internal and external email/website phishing we are seeing a rise in “spear phishing” where an attempt is made to compromise a specific user using publicly-available information to appear to be a trusted entity. The end of this email describes such an attack initiated with a telephone call that happened recently in our department.

Someone finds an online poster for a future conference. They look up a speaker’s office phone number and email address. They call the speaker’s office, and tell them that they are booking the hotel for them for the conference (they know the conference location and dates). They ask the speaker to provide their credit card information to secure the room; they say that the credit card will not be charged, that this is just to secure the room. However, the organizers of conference confirmed they did not place the call to the speaker.